Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives

The personal story that he crafted with his cowriter was riveting: In 1993, after a failed attempt to climb K2, Mortenson became separated from his companions on the descent and, disoriented and ill, stumbled into the mountain village of Korphe in the rugged Karakoram Range where Pakistan borders China. He was embraced by the village elder, Haji Ali, and nursed back to health. When he departed, Mortenson promised he would return to the village where the people saved his life and build them a school. The story is sharp and compact. From the vivid descriptions of a mountain rescue to the domestic details of being cared for in a Balti home, Three Cups of Tea’s origin story delivers maximum emotional impact.

Mortenson spent five years honing his personal story for Western audiences in letters and lectures soliciting support for his plan to build schools. By the time he collaborated with professional author David Oliver Relin, Mortenson had shaped a potent life narrative that concocted elements of travel, adventure, saving girls, and individual pluck into a vehicle for eliciting sympathy from his audience and extracting donations. In its savvy combination of adventure and exoticism and featuring a compelling action figure at its center, Three Cups provided a way for Western audiences to connect with a part of the world in which their government was pursuing an endless war. By the time Relin and Mortenson collaborated, the origin story of Three Cups of Tea had become a pitch masquerading as testimony.⁵

As late as 2010 and 2011 Mortenson was a fundraising dynamo and popular figure. He was championed by New York Times op-ed writers Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who praised his ability to build schools in Taliban territory and promoted his “guidance” for Afghanistan.⁶ Yet in 2011 Jon Krakauer, the author himself of several iterations of the boys’ adventure genre that combine mountaineering, wilderness adventure, and young men in the throes of coming of age, smelled a rat.⁷ Krakauer, an early supporter of Mortenson, had been mightily moved by Mortenson’s story and donated $75,000 to CAI. Based in part on his sense that there was something wrong with Mortenson’s chronology and topography, Krakauer investigated. The result was an exposé entitled Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way.⁸ According to Krakauer, Mortenson was using his nonprofit as a “personal ATM.” Krakauer debunked the Korphe narrative, claiming that Mortenson may have spent a couple of hours there on the K2 descent, but it is more likely he went to Korphe later. Thus the gripping tale of a fateful wrong turn on the descent from K2, the treacherous crossing of a swollen river, and the experience of tender care that brought Mortenson through a life-threatening illness and inspired his promise to build a school were all invented. Krakauer disputes that Mortenson could have crossed the river, as it had no bridge the year he attempted to climb K2, and alleges that the narrative that follows is a fable. In addition to the financial mismanagement and fictional adventure story, Krakauer revealed that many of Mortenson’s schools stand empty, and that what Mortenson described as his abduction by the Taliban consisted of a few days of hospitality by Waziri hosts.⁹ Krakauer contended that Mortenson had a bullied and complicit board of directors who refused to fire him and continued to pay his salary. Krakauer was featured in an interview on 60 Minutes, the attorney general of Montana opened an investigation into Mortenson’s misuse of CAI’s nonprofit status, and Mortenson, pleading ill health, retired from public view.

Recently, Mortenson has begun to venture into public. He steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any intentional wrongdoing; instead, he demurs about financial mismanagement: “I always have operated from my heart. I’m not a really head person.” Mortenson calls himself a “storyteller” who is not much interested in “accountability, transparency.” He leans on the privilege of “poetic license” and suggests that what Krakauer identified as deceit consisted mainly of compressions in the timeline that resulted from Mortenson and Relin’s collaboration: “I stand by the stories. The stories happened, but…not in the sequence or the timing.” When pressed to express regret for his actions, tellingly, Mortenson talks about life writing rather than life: “What I regret is that we were under tremendous pressure to bring about a million words down to 300,000 words.”¹⁰ For Mortenson, the “stories happened” even if the events to which they testify did not.¹¹

Relin, too, found Mortenson’s sense of time to be fluid and the details tricky to pin down. But as Relin traveled with Mortenson in the course of preparing the book, he became a convert and an advocate. “So this is a confession,” Relin writes at the end of his introduction to the book: “Rather than simply reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted.” Relin amplified the literary voice that characterized Mortenson’s narration of the Korphe origin story, and it proved crucial in speeding Mortenson’s message through the testimonial network: “Working on this book was a true collaboration. I wrote the story. But Greg Mortenson lived it.”¹² Life and writing came to represent separate domains for Relin, but not for Mortenson, who claims lead author status in the byline.¹³

Mortenson’s comments about Relin’s role go beyond mere deflection of shared responsibility. They indicate the appeal of the neoliberal humanitarian narrative Mortenson developed over five years of pitching and that Relin successfully transposed into print. Mortenson’s account combines familiar elements of individual overcoming with distant locales newly pertinent to Western book buyers. More important, it presents a new figure in what Gillian Whitlock describes as the “soft weapons” armory: the humanitarian hero, whose testimony on behalf of education and girls, in particular, will offer a proxy witness to their experience.¹⁴ Mortenson’s new role as spokesperson for girls, global advocate for building schools, and valued cultural advisor to the U.S. military in Central Asia all arise from the power of a highly developed personal story. As with Clarence Thomas’s Pin Point strategy, the story would provide access its narrator’s life alone could not.

Life writing as a testimonial art evolves alongside the novel, law, and human rights discourse and shares with them an investment in an “I” that is endowed with a unique and communicable perspective and is capable of bearing witness. Less a bounded genre with unifying stylistic features than a flexible discourse in which one can say “I,” life writing in the context of neoliberal humanitarianism can become the means through which to offer proxy witness, as Mortenson and Relin’s text demonstrates. Mortenson and Relin adapt the boys’ adventure story to enable a man to represent the needs of girls. In so doing, they capitalize on the capacity of the personal story to contribute to humanitarianism a face and a form through which to see and touch the suffering of distant others, and they borrow, too, from the novel in their crafting of a testimonial and literary “I.”¹⁵ Mortenson offers a conduit through which to channel feelings of responsiveness in others. He uses girls as proxies to perform a gendered and colonialist ventriloquism through which the voices of women and girls are occluded. Stories like those created by Greg Mortenson do a particular kind of work in testimonial networks: they simultaneously indicate an openness to and even a demand for the personal stories of girls and women and yet attach credibility to a white, Western, and male spokesperson who amplifies his significance as an intermediary in understanding and engaging with them and their needs.¹⁶ Mortenson’s exposure in 2011, like the exposure of James Frey in 2006, taints the circuits through which all testimony travels. Yet Three Cups of Tea, published in the same year as Frey was exposed, made its way for five years without challenge. Mortenson’s case shows how the stigma of doubt attaches to testimony differentially based on gender, race, and nationality, and also how the market for narratives from Afghanistan provided cover, as Gillian Whitlock argues, for deceit.¹⁷

Three Cups sits squarely within the context of neoliberal storytelling, an ascendant subgenre that grows out of the surge in memoir publishing and displaces feminist life stories that combine creative innovation and the representation of, among other things, trauma, as I argued in chapter 3. By the time Mortenson published Three Cups of Tea in 2006, the canon of neoliberal life narrative had gelled. Published in the same year as Eat, Pray, Love and with a similar non-Western setting as the “Love” section of Gilbert’s text, and following the 2005 publication of Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle, personal stories of redemption hit a high-water mark. Mortenson added a twist: adventure philanthropy. The neoliberal life narrative offers such a familiar script that Mortenson’s account fit neatly within its contours: rule-governed to the point of formula and resistant to complexity, it shrunk a global crisis to the scale of manageable, individual response. The key features of Mortenson’s neoliberal humanitarianism include the use of an individual’s story in the service of a cause, the capacity of a compelling story to carry and cover deceit, and the strategic use of girls and young women to justify intervention. Frey’s A Million Little Pieces likewise made use of the redemption story as Frey faced addiction and forged a recovery. Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea offered a “failure,” as he called himself, who was determined to do something meaningful with his life.

More significant are the ethical and political claims Mortenson makes through the expression of his personal life plan. Through his intervention, the lives of girls and women from the global South are transformed into vehicles for Western audiences to feel in particular ways: to experience themselves as caring and philanthropic, to have, in the ghostly embodiment of this discourse, their eyes opened and hearts touched. The actual life stories of women and girls are proxy lives that advance Mortenson’s agenda.¹⁸ Mortenson uses third world girls’ life stories to construct a humanitarian heroism that enables him to travel undetected and authoritatively within the testimonial network. He grounds ethics in empathy elicited in response to his neoliberal life narrative in ways that limit the formation of an ethical response to insufficiently pure or sympathetic victims.

Neoliberal humanitarian narratives claim to benefit others by basing an ethics of engagement in the development of sympathy for those whose stories the hero tells. Gillian Whitlock suggests “fair trade” as a useful model for how Westerners should consume life stories; that is, that they should recognize that it is in “their own ethical interest to ask questions”¹⁹ about the sources of such stories. That readers prefer the story even after such due diligence has been undertaken highlights the potency of genre. Despite the generic quality of Mortenson and Relin’s tale, this account sped through testimonial networks for five years without attracting doubt. In a network that already harbored the mechanisms for tainting women’s life stories and memoir, Mortenson’s gender, race, and timing combined to represent the story a hungry Western audience wanted about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For some, the astonishing durability of Mortenson’s appeal exceeds Krakauer’s criticism. Unlike Lance Armstrong, who was let go by the Livestrong Foundation after the full range of his doping came to light, Mortenson’s CAI has not gone forward without him, and Mortenson remains on the payroll.

Visual representations of Muslim girls and young women were enlisted in the marketing of books like Three Cups of Tea. As Gillian Whitlock notes, an explosion of images of veiled girls appeared on books marketed to Western audiences after 2001. Featured in block displays in bookstores, book covers highlighted veiled girls and women in a canny marketing strategy that offers up images to a colonial gaze.²⁰ Hillary Chute points to the homogenizing effect of this visual strategy and how it obscures the differences between texts like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, both published in 2003.²¹ Elizabeth Marshall and Özlem Sensoy chart the rise in narratives about saving global girls directed at young Western readers and accompanying the more adult-directed Three Cups of Tea and Reading Lolita and the welding of an ascendant missionary project to save Muslim girls.²² The marketing of humanitarian narratives relies on images and narratives that reference the veil as a form of oppression and in so doing reinstitute a colonial gaze.²³

The cover photo of Three Cups of Tea features three young girls, their heads bent over books and covered in white hijabs. A young adult version of Three Cups repeats the image but reduces the girls to two. The images echo the cover of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran that features a closely cropped photograph of the faces of young women presumably reading the Western classics that are the focus of the memoir. Hamid Dabashi has shown that the original photo serving as the cover image for Reading Lolita in Tehran was cropped to remove the newspaper the women were reading and their public location.²⁴ The incorporation of specific visuals in the peritexts exemplifies a moment in which the iconography of the veil as shorthand for “in need of saving” and the neoliberal life narrative coincide to represent and encourage humanitarian witnessing about the global South for Western audiences.

Images make crucial contributions to the testimonial network.²⁵ As recent studies in visual culture that focus on witnessing underscore, images create relationships between viewers and objects. In so doing, they rely on the appearance of transparency, and the fiction that what is framed in the image is simply captured from life.²⁶ For Wendy Kozol, visuality is a primary mode of engaging with distant suffering. Looking at images of distant conflicts is structured through ambiguity because of the ways in which spectatorship blends with ethical witnessing: “Without visuality, and without spectacle,” she asks, “how can representations acknowledge the ways in which trauma is not a universal experience but rather occurs in historically specific contexts that mobilize gender, race, sexual, religious, and other factors to produce differences foundational to such violences?” Images, like the ones above, bear witness as they “mobilize gender, race, sexual, religious, and other factors” in complex ways.²⁷ The images that represent credibility and truth in the visual matrix Kozol describes play on gender, as well as expectations of cultural similarity and difference, to span distances of knowledge and affect. But the attribution of Western norms to interpret the needs and aspirations of distant women and girls narrows the pathways along which witnesses may travel.

Images of veiled schoolgirls and young women that repeat the association of books as a symbol of beneficial Western intervention also shape views of the complex societies women and girls inhabit. What life stories may women and girls tell about their complex lives in relation to their association with certain visual images? How are their stories conditioned by the visual preference for young, pure female victims as the worthy focus of ethical engagement? At risk here is the promotion of an ethics built on sympathy for those who can become knowable in particular ways: for example, by desiring education, or needing protection from religious fundamentalism. Thus the Mortenson case reveals two key features conditioning how the benevolence of humanitarian witness compromises women’s credibility: First, their voices are presented through the “I” of the humanitarian hero, as his experience and valor supplant her perspective, further centralizing, in a subtle way, the credible voice as his and the authenticator of testimony as the humanitarian. Second, the visual iconography of veiled girls and young women reading further strengthens Mortenson’s argument about what they need, a commonsense appeal that enabled the Central Asia Institute to mismanage funds for years before detection. More than that, the first world audiences believed they were hearing girls’ stories and responding to their call for attention and action when what they were hearing was the compelling “I” of human rights heroes and the neoliberal life narrative, and what they were seeing was an illustration of this discourse.

The “I” of neoliberal humanitarian narrative offers a stock figure—the humanitarian hero who helps or makes it possible for the girl to be courageous—honed to deliver a message of transformation and uplift. This figure connects with audiences to promote the fellow feeling of an intimate public and to draw together the discourse of humanitarianism and ethical witnessing by evoking the testimonial “I” central to both. The testimonial “I” carries the burden of hope, but it has limits. It can bear witness, elicit testimony, and provide a framework for understanding how human rights emerge in specific contexts.²⁸ It cannot, however, “guarantee the ethical and political conditions that secure an appropriate response.”²⁹ Even as the “I” bears witness, its uptake is “unpredictable.”³⁰ In memoir, the desire for “forensic truth” (the verifiable facts) must give way to an acceptance of “narrative truth” (the personal and subjective truths of storytelling).³¹ The truth of testimony is ambiguous,³² is affectively insecure,³³ is difficult to interpret, and cannot guarantee satisfying conclusions. Ultimately, as Gillian Whitlock notes, its use has purposes that exceed the conditions from which it arises: the “management of testimony is almost always strategic.”³⁴

Kristof and Wu Dunn launched an essay contest in the New York Times as part of the rollout of Half the Sky, their book and “movement to end oppression of women worldwide.”³⁵ The contest called for stories of survival and hope by women in extreme conditions. Kristof and WuDunn invited readers to share stories that would build their case for “fighting poverty and extremism globally by educating and empowering girls through tales of suffering and overcoming.”³⁶ The choice of “tale” is important here: it evokes a genre that blends entertainment with moralism.³⁷ These stories, “as powerful as they are heartbreaking,” offer rescue and redemption narratives in which all the victims have suffered greatly, are worthy of compassion from Western readers, and show resilience in the face of overwhelming hardship. They endure and they rise. And because they are young, they are credible witnesses. Kristof and WuDunn’s preferred narrative grounds sympathy in the victim’s blamelessness and resilience. Their contest to find the best stories of “suffering and overcoming” recognizes the power of this story and promotes it into a genre via Kristof’s storytelling in his New York Times column, and also across the media and platforms promoted by the Half the Sky Movement. The preferred story circulates broadly, influences human rights reporting, and presents a model for what testimony should sound like. Through the emotional appeal of genre, Kristof and WuDunn declare: “We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way—not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen. This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you’ll just open your heart and join in.”³⁸ Winning stories open hearts.

The book was followed by a film of the same name in 2012 that featured “A List celebrities” touching down around a deterritorialized globe in search of women of color overcoming poverty and exploitation through courage (and the benefits of microlending). The film offered celebrity empathy as a model of engagement with the women and girls depicted in it. Half the Sky also offers teaching tools and a Facebook game though its website, Kristof and WuDunn have given TED Talks, and Half the Sky has branded itself as a movement. The Half the Sky Movement, formed as a nonprofit in 1998, is but one example of how such a cause expands by remediating the experiences and stories of girls and women of color. The template has been so successful that a network of foundations uses women’s life narrative to elicit empathy for deserving victims and promote various humanitarian and economic causes.

Yet who’s “I” and whose image sustain and motivate the empathy and ethical model that underwrite these projects? Kristof and WuDunn’s work raises questions about the relation of empathy and ethics. Like Mortenson, Kristof and WuDunn blend the pitch (e.g., “here’s the problem and here’s how to solve it”) with their own enactment of witness by proxy. As an example of humanitarian discourse, Half the Sky also mediates the voices of women and girls by scripting how their testimonial “I” will bear witness. In this shaping of their life stories, we hear the humanitarian voice, even as audiences feel they are hearing and seeing otherwise. When Kristof and WuDunn seek to show Western audiences what it feels like for a young woman to emerge from enslavement in a brothel to become a valued economic resource for her family, they use life narrative to compel empathy and elicit humanitarian action independent of political or historical understanding or cultural specificity.³⁹

Mortenson and Kristof advance humanitarian aims through storytelling. They aim at the heart, they say, and use the stories of vulnerable girls and women to carry forward their messages about global citizenship. Mortenson is initially in Pakistan for adventure. He is a tourist who returns to help. Kristof is a journalist who travels the globe to facilitate Western intervention in disparate locales. Neither Mortenson nor Kristof relies on a structure of testimony to ground projects ethically, to establish processes or goals, or to produce over time anything like the national narratives of truth and reconciliation that would hold Western donors accountable for how the governments’ activities contribute to structural problems outside the United States.⁴⁰ Instead, with the heart as their target, they rely on neoliberal storytelling, with its compelling cast of two-dimensional figures, its redemption and rescue plots, and its substitution of political action for the cash nexus of philanthropy.

The representation of catastrophic events in words and images has the capacity to elicit empathy. For many, the possibility of this emotional response—just, spontaneous, and reliable—represents the redemptive core of suffering and elicits the commonality of feeling that unites sentient beings. It carries the hope that, in the presence of a witness, violence can be survived. How first-person narratives by survivors of trauma elicit empathy in testimonial networks, as I have been arguing, cannot be predicted. Because gender and race stick to witnesses in the form of doubt, their testimony is often shaped strategically to evade aversion and apathy. When empathy fails, doubt and discrediting emerge. Neoliberal storytelling may well represent a canny intervention in the testimonial network to ensure that witnesses who would otherwise languish are heard. If the presence of doubt and its attachment to women witnesses, in particular, motivates the ventriloquization of increasingly formulaic life stories to elicit empathy, should we embrace the neoliberal life story valorized by Kristof and WuDunn strategically, as Gayatri Spivak previously invited feminists to embrace a strategic essentialism as a way for postcolonial subjects to maneuver within available discourses of self-representation?⁴¹

Given the strategic use of a proxy testimonial “I” in humanitarian storytelling, in what resides the power of Mortenson’s witness? What does the focus on his story as the vehicle for their stories contribute to the power of Western intervention on behalf of the health and education of communities, including girls? The choice of a shifting focus for empathy—Mortenson and girls and villagers in Korphe and Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan—propels a story that is so powerful, its generic witness so compelling, that it dispenses with the doubts that would attach to this tale had it come from a different spokesperson. We see in this case how whiteness and maleness speed what would otherwise be the sticky progress of his account through testimonial networks because Mortenson was not greeted with adequate credulity. The moving witness here is Mortenson, whose voice is crafted by Relin to emphasize his valor, vision, and value. Thus the intolerance for women’s accounts of harm is created alongside the acceptance of a male spokesman as the sponsor of women’s accounts.

In terms of understanding the copresence of narratives of harm about and by women and girls and the means to discredit them, we see how Kristof’s benign humanitarian contest narrows the portal through which testimony must pass and makes what counts as legitimate speech about harm into what will win a contest. Yet what precisely is the evidentiary standard for tale as distinct from testimony? The former privileges “story”; the latter seeks justice. Stories are shaped, and in this case shaped self-consciously to convey messages about resilience that induce empathy for the distant suffering of “similar others.” This is hardly the genre of deposition, a species of testimony that emerges through multiple interviews conducted by police and district attorneys in U.S. criminal courts and presented to grand juries. Yet as surely as legal protocols define how human rights claims can be pursued in distinct national locations, humanitarianism shapes courts of public opinion as stories circulated in the form of tales.

As Carole S. Vance argues about the infusion of melodrama in the form of documentary, “the outrage it evokes on behalf of the innocent victim reaffirm[s] a single intervention and ‘dream justice’: rescue and return to home, which is not the justice most women [who are trafficked into prostitution] want.” The problem is that “the larger structure of an increasingly globalized world economy is missing from [personal] accounts.”⁴² It is not simply that Mortenson and Relin are missing the point about how girls and women suffer and might be helped, but that the life stories they prefer are too limited. Structured as melodrama, in Vance’s reading, or as rescue and redemption narratives, or in the service of Mortenson’s and Kristof’s own heroic narratives of decent white men intervening with brown men on behalf of brown girls and women,⁴³ neoliberal tales invite identification with a Westerner who models empathy and action. This is proxy compassion, safer than an engagement with the complexities beyond saving an individual from abuse, and it generates a proxy politics of humanitarian neoliberalism.

These accounts narrow and norm women’s testimony. They create a context that motivates the use of witness by proxy. In the case of the stories sought and circulated by Kristof, the genre of the redemption narrative communicates what actual women are not allowed to: agentic speech about experiences of injury in order to access forms of redress. It is strategic: it represents a proxy politics of gender within the constraints of tainted witness. To offset the limited “education of the heart” in which such narratives school audiences, we must continue to engage with unsympathetic women witnesses, follow the arc of their testimony as it seeks a hearing, and learn to disentangle doubt from the discourses that construct it. Learning to read the testimony of tainted witness does more than broaden our sense of harm, agency, and justice, it restores the demand on the witness to cross a boundary in herself or himself, to move from sympathy as a form of ethics to something more fraught but more suited to the broken world from which testimony arises.